: “Never try to be cool.” I submit to the fair-minded reader that coolness — whether feigned, attempted and failed, or like dogs wearing sunglasses, weirdly consistent — has never really been a going concern for Canadian poets. In recent years, there have been a modest clutch (I’m thinking of David McGimpsey, Kevin Connolly, Jason Guriel and Damian Rogers) who really pull it off. Nick Thran is one of them. His poems are cool. Genuinely, impossibly cool.

Thran made a name for himself in 2006 when his first book,

Every Inadequate Name

, was published by Insomniac Press. That book moved through my generation like a secret handshake. It had poems in it with names like “The Impossible Omelette” and “Seriously, It was the Biggest Cricket.” He could sneer like a petulant greenhorn (“You don’t know shit, you want to say./ You don’t know how Pop sounds”) and smile like a flush retiree (“Bloor Street at sunset, easily/ the most romantic street in the world”). But

Every Inadequate Name

suffered from a young poet’s illness: There was too much poetry in it and too few poems. Thran’s voice had a residual quaver that could cause it to break adolescent, and the incongruities that made him so exciting — among them angular technical brilliance, early-onset melancholy and a wicked record collection —hadn’t yet quite cohered.

That all changes with

Earworm

(Nightwood, 2011). In his second book, Thran has both gotten better at what he did so well in his first, and has expanded his purview and range of utterance. He’s still cool, still the poet who can write movingly about

Ninja Turtles

and

ThunderCats

, the band Black Flag and about how

The Wall

“is an album by Pink Floyd which/ you’re proud to be able to finally admit/ is terrible now that you are not stoned/ in your friend’s basement at age fourteen.” But he’s also broken serious new ground, as in “Trigger” when Thran conjures his father “after drinking fourteen highballs and careening his car/ through an empty basketball court// and into the side of some public housing” and then imagines “the dumbstruck faces// of the strangers who had until then been sitting/ in front of the TV, and my father’s head// splayed over the steering wheel, cocked a bit to the left.” His formal work, which includes the weird, lovely pantoum “Coast Guard Vessel, Pleasure Boat” and the spectacular villanelle “North Slope,” shows that Thran now deeply understands the strategies of English verse. But he can also work in miniature. In “Silk Worms” the hanging bugs sing to him: “Miss you. Love you./ Wish you were here.// Balloons. Balloons./ Balloons.” Upside down, deflated and alive, those balloons are at least as exciting to me as Ezra Pound’s birds on a telephone wire turning into musical notes, maybe more. And in “Murder in a Hawaiian Shirt,” he delivers the brilliant, trippy “Everything/ quivering.”

There are a couple of misfires in

Earworm

; Thran can still rely too much on his charm (which, to be fair, is considerable) to do the heavy lifting for him. Poems like “Raining in Darling” and “Power” feel slight and notebooky. But I think he’s chosen a fitting image on which to end the book in the title poem. In “Earworm,” he writes of “Joe Carter’s ninth-inning blast/ in the ’93 Series” and “the sound when the ball/ hit the bat, and everyone knew they’d won/ before it left the park.” You might as well stand; this is Thran’s Joe Carter moment.

Three years younger than Thran and 3,000 kilometres away, Rob Taylor debuts in

The Other Side of Ourselves

(Cormorant Books, 2011) as a very different poet. Their subject matter overlaps — both men write movingly about their wives, their dead fathers, and tackle ekphrasis with flair and brains — but whereas the presiding influence of

Earworm

is the cosmopolitanism of Frank O’Hara, looming large over

The Other Side of Ourselves

— in excerpt, epigraph and esprit — is the down-home folksy candour of Al Purdy.

Purdy is a dangerous influence. His easy vernacular only sounds spontaneous; love it or hate it, it’s a calculated, deliberately crafted effort that took decades to master. And he had to write a lot of bad poems — including his famously inglorious debut

The Enchanted Echo

— to figure out finally how to sound like himself.

Taylor writes a bad poem about Purdy and

The Enchanted Echo

called “On Realizing Everyone Has Written Some Bad Poems” so I don’t think any of this is lost on him. Many of the poems in

The Other Side of Ourselves

aren’t very good. They lean hard on stock, capital-P Poeticisms — darkness and light, rivers, water, wind, sky, horizon, breath. There are some ludicrous turns of phrase (“chest hairs drunk on jacuzzi bubbles”) and po-faced ecstatics (“this joy of air,/ this voluptuousness of light”). One 12-line poem — “Spring Lament” — contains no fewer than seven clichés (“has seen the light”; “softened to its touch”; “long gone”; “winter winds,” etc). Somehow, Cormorant allowed him to keep the cities of composition em-dashed below three poems, a move that makes a poet look vain and self-canonizing; his editor, not Taylor, deserves the blame for that.

But there are also some really good poems in

The Other Side of Ourselves

: “Computer Monitor Ekphrasis” and “December Sonnet” are worth the price of admission alone. The important thing about this debut, and the reason why it’s notable, is that the bad poems are bad in the best way; they start weak and end strong. That doesn’t happen often. And I suspect Taylor’s career will run a similar course (in the acknowledgements he writes that most of the poems were written in a single year, between 2009 and 2010). Yes, we all write bad poems; but it’s obvious, at 27 and on a roll, that Taylor’s got lots and lots of good poems left in him.